'Surging through exits when the bell goes' explores the tension between closed systems like schools, and the placelessness of online systems, translating a design-led research project, originally materialising as a publication. It examines how digital infrastructures aestheticise and normalise control as care in schools, shaping the hidden curriculum through platforms, interfaces and everyday design cues.
Developed as a publication, the artist’s research moves through the physical and digital school, tracing how design mediates control. It is the artefact of a design-led, visual, and speculative study that examines how digital infrastructures aestheticise and normalise compliance, revealing the hidden architectures of schooling in the age of data.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of this exhibition at First Site Gallery, 5– 7pm, Wednesday 8 April.
Hilary Dodd is a communication designer working across print, spatial and visual communication. With a background in visual art, she works through site-responsive, photographic and narrative strategies to connect intimate or everyday experiences to broader cultural and institutional contexts.
Alongside her practice, Dodd has worked as a teacher across educational institutions and museums. This experience informs her interest in the translation of complex ideas, audience engagement, interpretation, and how design shapes learning and participation. She holds a Master of Communication Design from RMIT University, a Master of Teaching from the University of Melbourne, and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts.
Her work has been recognised through institutional exhibitions and national design awards, including the Australian Graphic Design Association.
Image: Hilary Dodd, image from 'Aesthetics of the Not-So-Hidden Curriculum (in the age of data)', 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
11am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday
Closed on public holidays
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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